I assume youāre already familiar with Moloch , the Metacrisis and our problems with Sensemaking when you find your way here. If not, there are plenty of resources out there to catch up. Iād especially recommend the materials of Daniel Schmachtenberger (the link is a truly amazing resource curated by Stephen Reid, he went through all the videos and podcasts, transcribed them, and linked keywords to timestampsā¦ Iām in awe! š ) and Liv Boereeās WinWin podcast.
Thereās a lot of long-form conversations out there, but also some shorter explainer videos that are great.
ā” Please do criticise this writing. I'm truly looking for some sort of solution, and we (collectively) need to evaluate what is good and what isn't. And no-one alone will be able to have that solution, so Iāll need you all! (But of course the more substantial and constructive the criticism is the better š ) ā¬
ā¼Def. Moloch
Moloch is a metaphor based on the ancient Canaanite deity to whom child sacrifices were reportedly made. In the context of Schmachtenberger's view, Moloch represents the forces of competition, selfishness, short-termism, and unbridled capitalism that sacrifice the well-being of the collective and the environment for short-term gain. The Molochian system pushes people towards behaviors that are harmful on a system-wide level even if theyāre beneficial at an individual or local level, creating a tragedy of the commons scenario.
ā¼How Moloch works
Simplified, Moloch is some monster/God who introduces whatās bad in our incentive landscape. And Livās WinWin is its counterpart, an imagined God that we might call on to help us creating situations where all participants benefit.
Moloch has way too much influence on so many of our day-to-day interactions, and weād want to be much further on WinWinās side. 100% if possible, although thatās probably too Utopian, even for me. (Slaying Moloch would be amazing though!)
Most (if not all) of what Moloch is doing boils down to the way our incentives and competition are set out.
We cut down trees because only then we can sell lumber for money (incentive). If we donāt, someone else will (competing for the same incentive).
We apply beauty filters because only then people will like our posts. If we donāt, our post wonāt be seen.
We spend more and more time competing for grants for research, until thereās no time at all left to do the actual research.
We press ahead with dangerous AGI research, because weāll get a lot of money, and if we donāt, ā¦ someone else will.
Oil companies conceal the climate catastrophe in order to keep the money flowing in. And if a CEO would decide otherwise, heād just be replaced.
Factory workers in many parts of the word are terribly underpaid, but they canāt strike or quit, because someone else would take their job even for less money the next moment.
It seems like every step of the way, we are incentivised to do the wrong thing for personal benefit, and because everyone else is incentivised to do the same it is basically guaranteed that at least someone will do it, so it might as well be me.
This system has been working terribly well for Moloch, and it seems like we are unable to do anything against it (hunter gatherers had basically the same issues as we do).
And thereās a lot of problems related to that:
the Metacrisis (all those dangers of AI, Nuclear War, Bioweapons, War on Sensemaking, Climate Crisis, increasingly vulnerable global supply chainsā¦) that we canāt seem to avoid (because weāre insentivised to do the wrong things over and over again)
the tragedy of the commons (we focus on our own personal gains and outsource the costs to the commons, e.g. by polluting the environment and everyone suffers)
civil stresses such as growing inequality, mass unemployments, dissatisfaction with politics, ā¦
I might be making it a bit easy to just bluntly ascribe all these as a downstream effects of Moloch and a bad incentive system, and itās not all 100% purely only from that (e.g. thereās also a lot of inner work and education to be done in individuals; we need to learn to act compassionately and to slow down our lives and not compare ourselves to others); but Iād say that Moloch is at least a very big part of all the above (and also for a lot of our inner struggles actually!)
ā¼AI summary of DS' view
Daniel Schmachtenberger is a philosopher and futurist known for his work on existential risks, civilization design, and the concept of "metacrisis." As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, he hasn't defined a specific problem landscape or generator functions of the metacrisis. However, based on his talks and interviews, we can extrapolate some key themes related to these topics:
Problem Landscape:
The convergence of exponential technology growth and global interconnectedness have created unprecedented challenges (the "metacrisis") that traditional systems are ill-equipped to handle.
Issues like climate change, nuclear weapons proliferation, systemic inequality, loss of biodiversity, and AI risks represent complex, interlinked problems with no easy solutions.
These problems are compounded by maladaptive cultural values and incentive structures that prioritize short-term gains over long-term sustainability.
Generator Functions of Metacrisis:
Short-sighted economic systems: Current market dynamics incentivize harmful practices, like environmental destruction and wealth concentration, rather than solutions to global problems.
Inadequate governance: Existing political structures struggle to effectively manage global and long-term problems due to issues like national bias, corruption, and short election cycles.
Societal polarization: Cultural divides and misinformation lead to social fragmentation, hindering collective problem-solving efforts.
Lack of a shared vision of the future: Without a common goal, humanity struggles to coordinate and take collective action towards sustainable futures.
I believe that the root of a lot of our problems are our misaligned incentives (Moloch). And I believe that by fixing those incentives (Slaying Moloch), we might fix almost everything else as well. I don't believe that we can fix all incentive misalignment problems. But I do think that we can fix many. And by 'fixing' I don't mean 'make them all perfect'. There will always be some unintended consequences, and some incentives can't be aligned to everyone's preference. But we can make many of them at least a lot better than what they are right now.
So let's directly dive into that, how could we 'fix' those incentives?
In broad brushstrokes:
Here's a list of things that I believe we will need to do. This is not complete, and might not always be right. But it's a start. (And again: I would love your feedback!)
ā¼We need to work together collectively to solve this issue
No one person alone will be able to solve this. No one organisation or government alone should solve this by themselves or have unique access to whatever solution we will come up with (potential of abuse & bottlenecks etc...).
WE means all the people of earth , we cannot exclude anyone, and vice versa we have to include people from the whole globe. We're dealing with global issues and catastrophes, it won't be enough if one/some governments address it while others don't. As long as we have only some involved, they will likely use this system/framework/whatever this is going to develop into for the benefit of their constituents (as is their duty), but this usually can only happen on the cost of others.
ā¼We need to ensure continuous equal access opportunity to everyone
Many of our governance systems have slowly morphed into systems that are mainly controlled and manipulated by a few powerful corporations or individuals. We have to prevent that from happening again. [This] needs to be open source, accessible by all (for all times), and un-capturable.
This doesn't mean that everyone has to be involved (nor should they). It just means everyone should have the opportunity to do so should they desire to.
ā¼We need a way to identify what we truly value
Not only those things that we currently assign a monetary value are valuable.
'Things' is only a poor approximation of what is meant in lack of a better alternative. These aren't only stuff you can buy; it includes services, creations, behaviours, states (the state of a tree that's alive on public land), polluted vs unpolluted air, etc...
Instead of letting corporations and media tell us what we should value, we need to make a conscious effort to figure out and decide what we want to and should value.
To do that, we need to have a good way of discussing and deliberating about those things, and some mechanism that would allow us to value different things in different geographic or socioeconomic locations.
Optimally we'd want a hierarchy of what we value more, or a mechanism to converge those towards better states of value (i.e. less negative effects).
For example, initially we might agree that we value owning our own private powertools. This should converge towards having access to those powertools and having a shared one for households in close proximity. Which should converge towards having fewer and fewer powertools and better sharing and maintenance mechanisms. (Which might converge towards not 'sharing' powertools at all, but instead a friend with access to one that comes over to fix something along with you).
ā¼We need to know downstream- & side-effects
In order to identify what we value, we need to know as much as possible about the pro's and con's
Not everything that we value should be valued. (Many people might 'value' having non-sticky pans, but if production/use of those causes toxic chemicals to get into our water circulation then we should not promote its production.)
ā¼We need a way to incentivise those values
Once we have figured out what we want to value, we do need to create an incentive to actually pursue those and not some other misaligned and possibly harmful things.
This incentive doesn't need to be fiat money (although it could be). Depending on the scale, it might be just some local recognition, it might be tokens of appreciation or reputation, they might be fungible (=tradeable) or not. It might be something that makes us see the current of value flow (see Arthur Brock's vision of currencies current-sees)
ā¼We need to constantly update all of the above
Knowledge changes, our situations change, we might find out about unintended consequences down the line. We need to be able to consistently update incentivised values and associated metrics to reflect these changes.
ā¼We need to constantly control all of the above
We need to be able to react to cases of misuse and loopholes once we identify them.
We'd also be well advised to find some mechanisms to limit the influence of social media and populist mood makers that would push for recognising values that are on their agenda (Moloch rearing it's head š¹)
ā¼This needs to be done on all levels, from hyper-local to global
As indicated in the first point, this needs to be a global effort. However, we can't neglect local and bioregional differences either. So values can and should be defined and incentivised differently depending on your region. But they should also be able to bubble up and propagate down where applicable.
Adding some detail
Those brushstrokes might as well describe many of our current democracies, flawed as they might be: We can all participate in democracy on different levels by voting or by becoming officials in the system; parties are continuously debating about what to value and are trying to point out each others policies side-effects. We use laws and subsidies to incentivise various things, and everything is under constant flow and scrutiny. So what's different š¤ ?
Well, the idea is basically the same, in a way. It would be a democratic system. But it needs a serious update. (And yes, I do believe that democratic systems basically always tried to address that issue: Decide what we value and how to incentivise that. It's been about that all along!)
Erm, ok, I've read enough about the broken democracy and that we need to fix it. It's getting boring and I lose faith in that we can update it; we've tried and tried...
Yes, me too. But before you're frustratingly close this tab, let me give you a quick glimmer of hope:
We don't need to fix the existing system. We can just build a new, better one, in parallel to the existing one. We don't need anyone's permission, we can experiment with it, optimise it, let it grow, until it reaches enough influence to be a force that governments don't want to ignore any more. And slowly the old system will become obsolete.
It's actually not that difficult, really! Would you have thought a few years ago that we could ever change anything about our monetary system? Well, here we are and see what Bitcoin & Co have achieved. Yes, they have not replaced yet the mighty US$, but they're now definitely a force to recon with and here to stay; and everyone (including many governments) is releasing their cryptocurrency.
You might also have heard of Web3 and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organisations), they're about to introduce new ways of browsing the internet and running organisations with people from all around the globe without CEO's; all things that just a few years ago I would have thought is something impossible.
Ok, with that glimmer of hope, let's look a bit at what's already happening, and what we still need to do.
We need to work together collectively to identify what we value
Forby.io, swae.io, pol.is, digitaldemocracy.world, societylibrary.org, ... these are only a few of the many projects that enable us all together collectively to deliberate and figure out in various ways what we value. Most use some sort of liquid democracy and new voting mechanisms such as conviction voting, which will enable a more direct interaction with proposals (be that at a local community level or on a global scale).
There are a lot of projects that go into analysing the pro's and con's of various approaches or opinions, such as kialo.org or debatemap.app, that will also play an important role in getting to the bottom of what we value.We need to be aware of downstream- & side-effects
Traditional science has and will continue to play a major role in this. The big challenge is to collect and collate all the relevant (and accurate) research in a way that's easy to understand with the values we're discussing. Partly we will have to rely on wiki-style user contributions and curation, and probably helped by AI. But there are also projects (such as isgood.ai ) that specialize in impact analysis, and there is an increasing number of Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) endeavours in the web3 space that can help keeping track of downstream results.But apart from this, we will always need human eyes to scrutinize these value propositions and issues. We need to allow and invite valuable criticism. We might not ever get anything that won't have any downsides, but we need to at least try to avoid those that we can identify and that we can avoid.
We need to incentivise doing what we value
At the moment the money supply is controlled by a few governments and institutions like central banks; and the market + subsidies (& other government control mechanisms) control how much money we assign to things. We (the people) don't have much influence on this. (We're being told that the market is all supply and demand, but in reality that is only a very small part, companies & institutions artificially creating demand has decoupled that logic).
So we need to gain back the control over the money supply (because that's a big part of incentivising things), and we also might be able to create alternatives to money in the first place (which helps to get that control).With the advent of crypto-tokens there's been a plethora of experimentation in this area. A lot of it is very traditional with some tweaks ('classical' cryptocurrencies; tokens that you earn and use and often exchange with others in similar ways to money), but there are also others, like the emergence of NFTs or 'gratitude tokens' or contribution badges.
There are many 'ReFi' (REgenerative FInance) or 'DeFi' (DEcentralised FInance) DAOs that focus on creating a new economic incentive landscape (refidao.com, hive.org, SEEDS, ...) or that figure out how to assign value to one particular activity (such as Plastic recycling, reforestation, funding Public Goods).
on the blockchain, which enabled us to have trustless ledgers (i.e. without intermediaries), but there are also other amazing projects like Holochain by Arthur Brock that have the vision of making the flows of value more visible (current-sees).We need to ensure continuous equal access to this new democratic system
Web3 and the 'trustless' decentralisation movement is basically all about that: To move away from companies controlling servers and access to their data. (The word 'trustless' can be a bit misleading, but it means that we don't need to trust a third party like Facebook with our data, and instead we can trust directly each other (via technological proofs)). We gain autonomy from these institutions via automation and implementing concepts like 'zero-knowledge' proofs and others. Identity providers give us trust in that we're dealing with real people without having to rely on a government (who could refuse to hand out passports).It needs to be open, updateable & controllable
Our world changes so fast, and we need to be able to adapt continuously, and so will this system. The best way to achieve that (in my opinion) is by having it radically open source with volunteers being able to constantly add improvements (and of course with corresponding safeguards, e.g. reviews and vulnerability checking etc).
And we need safeguards not only on the code side of things, but also on the human side. We need to be able to protect discussions to keep them on point and civil. We need to be able to counteract undue influence and polarization. We need to be able to control spam and misleading value propositions. We need to be protected from big interest groups.
I don't have a silver bullet, but there are some established practices that can be implemented, and continuously iterated on.
In software everyone is used to performing code reviews before approving any change. We can do similar here and require a certain level of approval before new posts or any additions/changes become publicly visible. If anything's up for a vote, we could have participants go through a very basic test to at least ensure they have read and understood the proposal. Banning can be used as deterrent, and AI can be used in various places to discover patterns of abuse but also to help users navigate the space safely and possibly to check posts for profanity etc...
--> Takeaway: I think it can be done. The core building blocks are already there and/or being worked on.
Now we just need to bring them together.